As expected, the final 2018 Defense budget the Trump administration submitted to Congress on May 23rd calls for $640 billion in military spending, $52 billion more than the current year and breaking the current budget caps by the same amount.

But even amid a healthy plus-up in the top-line amount, the Pentagon says it’s found some modest ways to produce “efficiency” savings in 2018. Officials billed the budget as a fulfillment of two commitments Defense Secretary James Mattis made when he took office in January: rebuilding the military’s readiness and reforming its business operations.

“There are a number of ongoing activities that we continue to pursue,” said John Roth, the career senior executive who’s currently performing the duties of DoD comptroller. “We’re continuing to look at the major headquarters and to reduce them by 25 percent. We continue with acquisition reform, particularly with Better Buying Power 3.0. We continue to take a hard look at our service support contracts and make sure that they’re appropriate.”

The department said the largest chunk of the savings — $1.2 billion — will come from changes to business processes in the headquarters of the military services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is prohibiting federal agencies from issuing new awards or solicitations for laptop or desktop computers and directing them to limit those types of purchases to governmentwide contracting vehicles.

The new policy was announced Friday (Oct. 16, 2015) by federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott and Administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) Anne Rung.

For years, agencies have purchased basic IT equipment, such as laptops and desktops, using thousands of contracts and delivery orders “resulting in reduced buying power, duplication of contracts and little transparency into the prices that agencies were paying for similar computers,” Scott and Rung said in a post on the OMB blog. (A recent inspector general review, for instance, reported one agency paid 42 different prices for the same desktop model in 2012.)

Federal contractors shouldn’t worry about the Defense Department ramping up its oversight of independent research funding, said the DoD’s top acquisition official at an event in Arlington, Va. on Wednesday.

Frank Kendall, DoD undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, told an audience at a Professional Service’s Council luncheon that by placing the funding under tighter scrutiny, DoD isn’t trying to dictate the kind of research coming out of the private sector.

Contractors have taken issue with a section of the newest iteration of the Better Buying Power 3.0 Initiative which would add time and costs to the review process for DoD contracts participating in independent research and development, or IRAD.

Around the nation’s capital, defense acquisition reform is surely in vogue. Last month, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, capped off his multiyear expedition in this space with the unveiling of a House bill to modernize the Pentagon contracting. On the other side of Capitol Hill, Sen. John McCain. R-Ariz., and the Senate Armed Services Committee have taken up the issue as well.

Enter Frank Kendall. Just a few short weeks after Thornberry put his stake in the ground, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for acquisition, logistics, and technology released Better Buying Power 3.0. The initiative complements Thornberry’s broad legislative push with a set of tactical recommendations that aim to coax the many stakeholders in the defense sector toward more efficient collaboration and more effective outcomes. Though BBP 3.0’s provisions get way down into the weeds of the Defense Department’s acquisition machine, its fundamental (and lofty) goal is to protect American “technological superiority.” In this light, the initiative builds on earlier versions appropriately in certain respects and falls short in others.

While the message is “stay the course” in some areas, this latest cut ventures into new terrain in several ways to preserve the military’s technological edge. BBP 3.0 reinvigorates “prototyping and experimentation” to get greater capabilities out to soldiers at a faster clip. The initiative also promotes stronger long-range research and development efforts, positioning the Pentagon to harness new technologies for tomorrow as well as for 2030. It’s a prudent, yet ambitious campaign.

The Defense Department (DoD) on Thursday, April 9 released the third update of its Better Buying Power acquisition strategy in five years, aiming to preserve U.S. technological superiority by protecting budgets for long-term research and development while enhancing cybersecurity.

“We want to identify the weapons, in the systems in the force today, that we can use in more innovative ways, and we’re looking for these promising technologies that we can pull forward,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work told a Pentagon press conference Thursday. The goal is to reverse “a steady erosion of our technological superiority that we have relied upon for so long in all of our defense strategies.”

Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, in releasing a memo to top management outlining Better Buying Power 3.0, said that flat budgets and sequestration have required the department to raid modernization dollars to pay for readiness. “Our technological superiority is dependent on the effectiveness of our research and development efforts that span science and technology, component development, early prototyping, full-scale development, and technology insertion into fielded products,” Kendall wrote.

Vendors are on edge and growing more nervous about the state of the federal acquisition environment. Blame sequestration. Blame the government shutdown. But the real culprit is LPTA — lowest price, technically acceptable — an approach to evaluating procurements that is changing the federal acquisition landscape.

And all signs point to agencies continuing to use this approach in the coming years to buy goods and services, thus forcing federal contractors to have no choice but to adjust.

“We have to accept lowest price may just be best value for the government customer,” said Lisa Dezzutti, president and CEO of Market Connections, during a briefing to industry on new research and a new survey of how LPTA is impacting the government market. “We have to pursue new and lower cost business models.”

Lowest price technically acceptable is not really a new concept when it comes to acquisition evaluations, but it has been gaining favor among agencies, specifically the Defense Department over the last few years. Through its Better Buying initiative, DoD has offered LPTA as one of several approaches to improve how they buy goods and services.

Now it seems civilian agencies are following suit. Centurion Research Solutions analyzed more than $27 billion in procurements and found the Veterans Affairs Department is the biggest user of LPTA among non-DoD agencies.